Percona Announces Drizzle Support, New MySQL Support Pricing

Santa Clara, Calif., Apr 12, 2011 -- Percona today announced commercial Drizzle support at the O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo. Percona's MySQL support contracts cover all popular versions of the open-source MySQL database and its derivatives. The latest addition, Drizzle, is a lightweight SQL database for the cloud and web. Percona also introduced a new pricing tier that is more affordable for companies with a small number of servers.

The Drizzle Database

Drizzle reached the GA (generally available) milestone with the Drizzle 7 release in March 2011. It is an open-source relational database that supports modern Web standards such as the UTF8 character set, the IPv6 internet protocol, and LDAP authentication. Drizzle is a fork of MySQL, and uses MySQL's ACID-compliant InnoDB storage engine. Legacy features from MySQL have been removed or rewritten, and all non-core functionality is built as plugins. This helps promote development of extensions while keeping the server's kernel clean and stable.

Creating a community of developers has been a top priority for Drizzle since its beginning in 2008. Interested persons are welcomed to join the community in Santa Clara, California on Friday, April 15th in a free Drizzle Developer Day event.

Percona's MySQL Support Contracts and Drizzle

Percona's announcement of commercial Drizzle support is the latest sign that Drizzle has earned a lasting place in the MySQL family of database servers. Percona's Drizzle support is part of their MySQL support offering, backed by a global staff of over 40 experts. Percona's competence with Drizzle is showcased in their code contributions, including a feature to enable fast warmup of the database after restart. Percona's XtraBackup backup tool is also targeted for inclusion in the next Drizzle release.

Percona's new pricing tier breaks their tradition of not selling per-server support. Believing that per-server pricing was not a good value for customers, Percona previously offered contracts only for unlimited numbers of servers. But this was too costly for customers with only a few servers, and many companies prefer the simplicity of budgeting per-server. Like all of Percona's contracts, the new pricing tier includes 24x7 access to support via phone, email, chat, and a web portal, with unlimited incidents, login support, and fast SLAs for response times. In addition to Drizzle, the contracts cover MySQL, Percona Server, MariaDB, Amazon RDS for MySQL, XtraBackup, and Maatkit.

ABOUT PERCONA, INC:

With over 1000 customers globally since 2006, Percona is the largest and oldest independent MySQL services vendor. Percona provides enterprise-grade MySQL support, consulting, training, and engineering services to companies such as Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Groupon, and the BBC. Percona's founders authored the definitive book High Performance MySQL from O'Reilly Press, and the widely read MySQL Performance Blog. Percona also develops software for MySQL users, including Percona XtraBackup, the only open-source hot backup utility for the InnoDB storage engine. XtraBackup makes non-blocking backups while the database server processes transactions, and is praised by companies such as Facebook.